This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined below at the end of the specification but prior to the claims.
A future WiFi network, termed a High Efficiency WLAN (HEW) in an IEEE Study Group, envisions higher data rates of 10 Gbps but is expected to be deployed with very dense nodes such as STAs. Recent discussions in the Study Group suggest much of the energy is wasted in receiving management frames like Beacons and Probe Response frames.
Due to the dense deployment of nodes in HEW, there is a high probability of experiencing an “exposed terminal” problem. That is, with two nodes, each associated to only one AP within a BSS, one node in a BSS may be able to hear (e.g., is exposed to) transmissions from another node or the AP in another BSS and continue to back-off, instead of accessing the WiFi communication medium (e.g., a spectrum including one or more channels). Since WiFi is a contention-based system were two nodes such as STAs contend for the communication medium, this means the one node is backing off from contending for the communication medium even though there is no need to do so, since each STA is within a BSS and should be able to communicate within that BSS. This exposed terminal problem may be pronounced with increasing number of nodes getting exposed to transmissions from proximal nodes in another BSS.